Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect, 2nd Edition

10

The Long Short Screenplay

For the past four screenplays, you’ve focused on essential elements of drama—discovery, decision, conflict, connection—and you’ve created and crafted these in short screenplays. In the process, ideally, you’ve learned to write vivid and economical descriptions of setting, character, action, using higher and more significant detail, and you’ve learned to sharpen your dialogue, letting your characters say far more with less. And along the way, you’ve probably noticed that these elements of drama—slippery little devils—are tricky to isolate. They tend to hang out together in screenplays— a discovery precipitating a decision, a conflict giving way to connection, and vice versa.

A dance.

So now it’s time to clear the creative ...